Dear Megan

Rita Schuyler has always suspected she was born in the wrong century. She keeps a journal instead of a phone, prefers a book that smells of glue, and aces every history test she is handed. Then one Friday night in 2018, walking home from a party she never wanted to attend, she goes to sleep in one era and wakes up in another: a New York at war, a house full of blue and buff uniforms, and Colonel Dominic Megan smiling down at her as though they have met before.

They have, in a way. She has studied him. A crumpled page of school notes rides in the back pocket of her jeans, headed Dominic Megan: background and financial system, and it reads like a prophecy. She knows about the green sash he wears as General Wendy's aide. She knows about the bank he will build, the pamphlet that will shame him, the rival who already resents him, and the July morning in 1804 when he will keep an appointment across the Hudson at Weehawken and never come home.

Knowing is the problem. Staying is the harder one. The century keeps snatching her back - three lost months, then years at a stride - and every leap costs her a piece of the life she is trying to build. She marries him anyway. She bears his children, learns to nurse soldiers, to stitch coats, to hold her tongue in drawing rooms, and to love a man the newspapers will one day villainize. And when the scandal breaks and grief comes to her door wearing a duel's face, she does the one thing history never expected of her: she refuses to let his enemies write him.

Their courtship lives in paper. He numbers their letters to keep the war from losing them - This is number one - and she labours over every reply, outmatched by his pen and in love with being outmatched. It is fitting, then, that the book's darkest hour begins with a box of his letters and a roaring fire, and that its redemption arrives thirty years later in an enemy's trembling hands.

For the world may have his years - but she has him. That is the promise of a terrible sonnet he recites to her in the snow at Morristown, fourteen lines she will carry in a locket at her throat for the rest of her long life.

Told by a woman who outlived her husband by decades and spent them answering his letters, Dear Megan is the book she wrote when the hired gentlemen gave up: the life of Dominic Megan, set down as truly as she knew how, and the last letter she never got to send. A time-travel romance with the heart of a historical epic - Valley Forge winters, the surrender at Yorktown, the fever summer of 1793 - woven through with a love story that knows exactly how it ends and walks into it with open eyes.

She came two centuries to save him. She saved him. It cost her nearly everything. What she kept was the sonnet, the name, and the certainty that a borrowed thing can be the truest thing of all.

Goodnight, my dear Megan. I will see you in the morning.